


The Monster with a Thousand Faces

by Fallynleaf



Series: the Bobby John AU [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hunters & Hunting, Shifters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-02-14 04:53:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2178654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallynleaf/pseuds/Fallynleaf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every hunter had a tragic backstory. And every one of 'em had a death somewhere down the line. Eli's story was no different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Monster with a Thousand Faces

**Author's Note:**

> This piece ties into the Bobby John AU, since Sam and Dean and Bobby John have a run-in with Eli in [Got Under Your Skin](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2165958/chapters/4767669), but this ficlet itself is entirely standalone.

For Eli, it was his nephew. He'd been a sweet kid, his sister's Paul. Laughed a lot, liked playing in the yard with the dirt and bugs. Then one day, Eli's old mastiff dug up a human hand beneath the same tree Paul had been playing under not an hour before. Ruth spotted it first, because God knows no mercy towards mothers. And then Ruth and Eli tore up the earth and followed that delicate, decaying hand to a child's delicate, decaying body, until they brushed the dirt off of a dimpled face and Paul's glassy eyes were staring up at them, maggots crawling in his smile.

They knew, then, that the thing inside the house wearing Paul's face was not Ruth's son.

The next step had been finding out how to kill it.

But the shifter pretended 'til the very last, crying out in Paul's voice while they grabbed it and held it down. Something in Eli died when that first silver knife went into the imposter Paul's chest. It didn't in Ruth, because that part of her had already died when they laid out her real son on his funeral pyre and watched his ashes lift heavenwards on tendrils of smoke, the two of them standing an empty field with the night wrapped black and lonely around their shoulders.

Somewhere between their fourth and fifth kills, Eli put down the chewing gum and picked up tobacco instead.

And a few years after that, he took a bad blow to the face that shattered his spectacles and sent fragments of glass into his left eye.

Surgery allowed him to keep his depth perception, if only by a hair's chance. He wore contacts, after that. Though the left lens was so much thicker than the right one, his eyes no longer quite matched.

Eli never knew if it was the initial injury, the surgery operation, or the lens that did it, or maybe even God's own will, but after that, just in the one eye, he could see shifters. See the inhuman light in their eyes. And being a hunter, Eli knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he embraced it as the blessing it was and used it to hunt the sons-of-bitches that had murdered his nephew.

And that was how he knew, watching Ruth's second husband leave her room one morning, that she had lain with the beast instead. But all of Eli's rage couldn't stop that shifter from being the one that got away. Couldn't stop Ruth's belly from growing round with a monster's spawn inside of her. And certainly couldn't stop Eli from yelling terrible words accusing her for being the monster's whore. After that, she looked at him with a face that was so twisted in anger, he wondered if the thing inside of her was turning her into a monster, too.

In desperation, Eli tried to bring her to a clinic. But she looked at the line of people in front of it, waving their signs and threats, and just shook her head.

Eli found her, some weeks later, in an old midwife's cabin. She lay beneath a ragged quilt, her face weathered, gazing out the window. When Eli asked her, she turned towards him, her eyes colder than iron, and told him that it was taken care of.

That was the second time, and the last, that Ruth had to kill her own child. She never got pregnant again, after that.

Eli and Ruth hunted together for several more years, knowing that they made one hell of a team, and that their work was too important for them to let themselves fall apart because of it.

Then Ruth went off on her own hunt, and never came back from it. Either she was dead, or she wanted it thought that she was. Eli knew that Ruth was too good of a hunter for it to be anything other than purposeful either way. He didn't try and find her besides look for her body. There wasn't one.

Later, he wondered if she got out. If she left all of it behind her and started a new life somewhere that didn't include him and the terrible void he dragged with him when they were twin orbitals in the same space.

Eli saw Ruth three more times. The first was a hallucination, the second was a monster that pulled images from his mind, and the third was a shifter.

He didn't kill the shifter right away. Gave it time to change, first, into a busty girl that tried its best to seduce him. He let it. Brought it back to his room, and watched it try to catch him off guard as it writhed obscenely beneath him and moaned low and dirty.

Then he had a silver knife to its throat, and its smile twisted as it made threats and spat at him. Right before he killed it, it laughed and called him a filthy whore, and Eli felt dirty, all of him knotted tight with revulsion and guilt.

But he had the information he needed, and Eli was on the path that should lead him directly to the alpha. And if he had the opportunity to kill a couple of the monster's children along the way, then all's the better.


End file.
